“This is an exciting first step in this campaign,” Bostrom said in a statement announcing the formation of the “Bostrom for Sheriff” committee. “I am confident that my commitment to professional public service and to the core values of protecting our citizens, partnering with the community, reducing neighborhood crime, practicing fiscal responsibility, and collaborating with other law enforcement agencies are what the citizens expect from their sheriff.”

Bostrom is the son of veteran St. Paul City Council member Dan Bostrom, but is best known for heading up security efforts during last year’s Republican National Convention. Fletcher was critical of security preparations for the national gathering, repeatedly warning that the St. Paul department had failed to recruit enough police officers to ensure that it went off without serious problems.

Fletcher is a polarizing figure. The sheriff’s department drew the ire of social-justice activists last year by infiltrating the (ironically named) RNC Welcoming Committee. A series of police raids in the days leading up to the convention eventually resulted in criminal charges against eight activists who were allegedly plotting to damage property and disrupt the Republican gathering.

The four-term incumbent’s also been at the center of an investigation into the activities of the beleaguered — and now disbanded — Metro Gang Strike Force. Two damning reports released earlier this year alleged that the law enforcement agency routinely seized money from citizens without justification, failed to adequately keep track of its assets and displayed a general disregard for the civil rights of citizens, particularly minorities. The Ramsey County Sheriff’s Department was the fiscal agent for the gang strike force.

In 2006, former St. Paul Police Chief William Finney took on Fletcher in a bruising political contest, but the incumbent ultimately prevailed by just over 1,000 votes.

A forum held by the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) in Minneapolis this week centered on the relationship between law enforcement and the media at the Republican National Convention (RNC) and indicated the extent to which journalism is evolving.

The event was organized in response to the predicament that numerous journos found themselves in while they covered the convention: By the Minnesota Independent’s count, nearly 50 journalists were arrested or detained by police at the RNC, including MnIndy’s Paul Demko, while more than 800 people were taken into custody.

St. Paul city officials announced last week that the city wouldn’t prosecute journalists facing “unlawful assembly” charges, but many still want to know why they ended up in plastic handcuffs in the first place, or what they could’ve done to prevent it. A couple reviews of RNC security efforts are being done in Minneapolis and St. Paul, but city officials say that police performance isn’t the focus.

The Uptake has video of the discussion here.

Not a witch hunt

Al Tompkins, a media expert who arrived from the Florida-based Poynter Institute, which trains journalists, moderated the talk, saying it would be a productive dialogue between representatives of the media and law enforcement and not a witch hunt. Still, emotions ran high. On hand to answer questions from Tompkins and attendees were St. Paul Deputy Mayor Ann Mulholland, KARE-11 photojournalist Jonathan Malat, St. Paul Assistant Police Chief Matt Bostrom and Pioneer Press reporter Mara Gottfried.

It started with a recap of the RNC’s events, featuring protest footage from Malat. Later, Malat made the point that he was herded onto the Marion Street bridge while trying to obey police officers’ dispersal order on the last night of the protests.

Assistant Police Chief Bostrom said protesters and journos had plenty of time to leave the scene. “If someone disobeys a lawful order, they shall be arrested,” he said, adding that it’s up to the individual officer’s discretion. He conceded that there may have been a gap in their planning because he and other law enforcement agencies didn’t anticipate the sheer number of people claiming to be media. In his 20-plus years of police work, he says he’s never encountered so many journalists involved in an hourslong criminal activity, as he put it. “What do you want us to do?” he asked the crowd.

Deputy Mayor Mulholland defended the police response to the RNC protests. Mayor Chris Coleman “believes that police did what they needed to do in the name of public safety.” When asked if it was legitimate for journalists to be on the scene, she answered, “I think the mayor ultimately believes that it is appropriate for journalists to be wherever people are gathered lawfully.” (Her statement was left hanging until someone referenced it later, saying that in order to continue covering an illegal activity, they would likely need to get farther away from the action, or run the risk of getting in the way.)

Further, “I think we have determined a special role for media to assure that members of the media have access and the information they need to tell a story. Having watched hours of footage, I’d be hard-pressed to think we didn’t give great access,” she said. But does that mean bloggers and traditional journalists should be lumped together as equals? “I don’t know who the journalist is … I think our approach was probably to treat everyone the same.”

Lawful journalists?

But the Associated Press’ David Pyle testified that not everyone was treated the same, not even within his news crew. Four AP staffers were detained, including one photographer who was forced to the ground and “roughed up” before being let go and another who was held for 10 hours. Coincidentally, it was one of their AP photos that the police used to ask for the public’s help in identifying the alleged anarchist who broke the Macy’s window during a protest. Pyle said he was relieved that police didn’t credit the AP. “We don’t want to be identified as an investigatory arm [of the police].”

Twin Cities attorney Mark Anfinson, who specializes in First Amendment law, said that when given the order to disperse, journalists “very much like covering a war, proceed with some risk. Here the risk is being arrested… It’s hard to see where the police violated rights as opposed to acting without a lot of tact or wisdom,” he said. “A lot of these charges were of this species, about failure to obey a lawful order… What’s a lawful order?”

Dave Aeikens, the national president of SPJ and staff writer of the St. Cloud Times, said he hopes that journalists and law enforcement officials can come to an understanding so arrests can be avoided in the future. While he said that SPJ prefers not to define who is a journalist, WCCO’s Jason DeRusha commented that he thought the whole reason for coming together was to find out who gets to be in the “in crowd.” Contrary to that, he said, independent media advocates seem to be arguing that journalists shouldn’t be afforded any special protections.

Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, which maintained a hotline for journalists during the RNC, said from her Virginia office that she was prepared for some of the things that went wrong. “Sometimes you have to get arrested,” she said, in order to keep doing your job. But in certain cases, such as the scenario with the AP staffers, “That is inexcusable.”

Photos by Kathy Easthagen

The St. Paul Police Department issued a detailed permit today laying out the parade route that protesters will be allowed to utilize on the opening day of the Republican National Convention. Marchers will be permitted to walk from the Capitol down Cedar St., proceed across 7th St. toward the Xcel Energy Center, and then circle back on a triangle of streets adjacent to the convention location.

“We believe we have struck that difficult balance that we’ve been looking for between free expression and safety and security,” assistant chief Matt Bostrom, who is overseeing RNC security, told reporters at a press conference this afternoon. “I believe it’s unprecedented access to the event.”

According to Bostrom, protesters will not be segregated from the Xcel center by barbed wire, as was the case at the Democratic convention in Boston four years ago. “If there is something there it would be a material that you can see through and you can hear through,” he said. “And we’re not going to mess with that.”

The assistant chief also insisted that parade security will be no different from other large gatherings in St. Paul. “Unless we get some confirmation that there are people in that route who have ill intentions, we’re going to staff this the way we normally staff parades,” he said.

The city issued a preliminary parade permit to the Coalition to March on the RNC and Stop the War in March, but the authorization lacked specific details on when and where protesters would be allowed to gather. The coalition filed a lawsuit against St. Paul in U.S. District Court, arguing that the vague parade terms violated the group’s constitutional rights. A hearing on the suit is slated for Friday.

It’s unclear what impact the newly issued permit will have on the litigation. “I don’t know,” Bostrom said when asked about the lawsuit. “As you probably understand, I can’t comment on that.”

Lawyers for the protest group raised a couple of remaining issues with the new permit. Bruce Nestor said his clients have concerns that the parade route will not physically accommodate all of the protesters and that they will be required to pass by the Xcel Energy Center no later than 2 p.m.

“They believe that will segregate the marchers from the majority of the delegates, the main activities of the day, as well as really segregate the marchers from the main media coverage in the evening,” he said. “The city is willing to grant freedom of speech to the Republican convention to disrupt traffic and put a considerable burden on the police. I think our clients believe that this is a grudging concession to the right of citizens to let their objections be heard.”

But according to a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in March, the First Amendment rights of protesters are being unconstitutionally proscribed by St. Paul’s parade permit policies. Next week, U.S. District Court Judge Joan Ericksen is slated to hear arguments in the case filed by The Coalition to March on the RNC and Stop the War. The suit charges that the group’s free speech rights are being violated by the city’s refusal to issue a parade permit laying out exactly when and where the protesters will be allowed to march on the first day of the convention.

The plaintiffs are seeking an injunction ordering the city to issue a permit immediately, along with a ruling that St. Paul’s current policy is unconstitutional and therefore invalid. The city is seeking to have the lawsuit dismissed and denies that its guidelines run afoul of the Constitution.

St. Paul issued a “conditional alternative permit” to the group in March, but it lacks explicit guidance on when and where the protesters will be allowed to assemble. Assistant Police Chief Matt Bostrom, who is overseeing security for the convention, has promised to supply a detailed permit by the end of this month that will allow protesters to gather within “sight and sound” of the Xcel center.

But organizers are skeptical of that commitment. “We’ve heard a lot from the city about what they plan on doing,” says Teresa Nelson, an attorney with the Minnesota Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union who is working on the case. “Time really is of the essence.”

St. Paul Police Department spokesman Tom Walsh says city policy is not to comment on pending litigation. “It’s a legal action against the city,” he notes. “We can’t say anything.”

This is so far the only lawsuit pending relating to RNC protest activities. But the ACLU and other concerned parties are closely monitoring the actions of surrounding municipalities. Earlier this week, the city of Bloomington postponed voting on a beefed-up protest ordinance after the civil liberties group wrote a letter questioning the constitutionality of the proposal. On Wednesday, the Minneapolis City Council debated an essentially voluntary protest permit policy, whereby groups would be encouraged to notify the city about large demonstrations, but wouldn’t be subject to any penalties if they fail to adhere.Four years ago in Boston, protesters at the Democratic National Convention were assured that they would be permitted to assemble within earshot of the FleetCenter. But organizers discovered just a week before the convention was slated to begin that the “demonstration zone” was to be a fenced-in area surrounded by razorwire that more closely resembled a prison courtyard. A federal judge, John Woodcock, described it as a “grim, mean, and oppressive space,” as well as an “offense to the spirit of the First Amendment.” But he declined to legally mandate changes to the arrangement because there wasn’t sufficient time to come up with a safe, viable alternative.

Lawyers for the St. Paul protest organizers fear that they will get caught in a similar legal limbo. “When the city says we’re using the Boston model, to me that’s delay, delay, delay until it’s too late for a court to vindicate First Amendment rights,” Nelson says.

The SPPD’s Walsh believes the Boston analogy is wrongheaded. “We have assured them that no later than May 31st there will be a parade route,” he says. “I just don’t think there are parallels.”

The litigation has brought forth some interesting nuggets of information about planning for the convention. In an affidavit, Bostrom states that the Police Department will supplement its force of approximately 600 officers with an additional 2,500 cops from various law enforcement agencies during the four-day gathering.

The city attorney’s office also submitted a legal exhibit featuring protest plans drafted by the activist group Students for a Democratic Society. Dated March 28, the document lays out designs to blockade the Xcel center, immobilize buses, obstruct area bridges–and ultimately shut down the RNC. “I’m not exactly sure what their motives are in providing that information,” says Nelson. “That kind of caught my eye.”

Nelson insists her clients plan to protest Republican policies and the war in Iraq through legal and nonviolent actions. “We’ve always been kind of frustrated that the City has not been more forthright and willing to work with this group that clearly does not want to engage in illegal activity,” she says.